Testing the Web Savvy of Local Liberal Groups

Last week, I perused a D.C. liberal event at which about three dozen organizations geared on social change sought the names and e-mail addresses of all who showed happened by. As a test, I signed up to about a dozen, freely giving my real information away. I expected a barrage of e-mail this week, asking me to volunteer or give money or check out their website.

How many did I receive?

One. One e-mail all week.

For organizations that require people power to push change, how can they just sit on my information and not hit me up while their friendly faces and causes are still in my head. If 11 of 12 organizations failed to follow up with me in a timely fashion, does that reflect the web savvy of local grassroots organizations? God knows that Amnesty, MoveOn.org, and the ACLU don't forget that I gave them my e-mail address.

I'm very disappointed.

Virals Just Sound Bad to Being With

I was first confronted with viral messaging on the campaign I worked on last year. The judge I worked for was running a statewide campaign with self-imposed contribution limits ($10 an individual...not kidding. He said, "Money and judges don't mix"). Our web consultant thought: OK, so there's this new tool people are using to spread the word about something. It's all done with e-mail. We film a video. They attach it to an e-mail and off it goes to infect the state full of Judge O'Neill lovin'.

Needless to say, we were super-excited about any idea that would convey the message to voters without having any money for TV. It excited us even more that we could take advantage of permission-based marketing and fuel the grassroots end of our campaign. So we dreamed our dream of an Ohio infected with Judge O'Neill. Sadly, we didn't even have the money to carry out the viral (the judge opted to pay his employees first, which is not how you win campaigns), but I wonder now whether it would have made much of a difference.

My intuition tells me that it couldn't have made up for all of the TV time our opponent had (we were outspent 30-to-1). At least not in 2004. And not in a supreme court race. But, then again, I guess that's the idea: You never know what will happen with a viral.

Unrelated Fun Pt. 1: Fashion à la Bob Jones

Oh my...

A morally errant friend of mine unearthed (i.e., saw on a blog somewhere) this wardrobe protocol for Bob Jones University students, which most notably bans the wearing, carrying or displaying of all articles of clothing that bear the logo of Abercrombie & Fitch or any of its subsidiaries "even if covered or masked in some way"!

I'm sure this will turn into quite the effective boycott, and it won't spur more A&F sales among our degenerate youth.

Rheingold Pt. 1: The Silence of Text Messaging

Until I read the April 2003 Reason interview with "cyberculture chronicler" Howard Rheingold, I must admit that the appeal of text messaging remained a mystery to me. The reason: If I can't enter the words in as fast as I think, I lose interest in the message. I always thought to myself, isn't this why we have keyboards? So we don't have to slow our brains down just to etch out a sentence? Combined with the rates Sprint wants to charge me per text message, the only reason I could imagine text messaging's appeal was if I was organizing the types of revolutionary protests and riots that would free me and my brethren from the likes of a tyrannical government.

Well, as it turns out, I'm a little off-base. Rheingold makes a simple, but important, observation: This kind of communication is not just fast, it's silent. "Your parents and teachers can't hear you," he explains.

No wonder my friends carry out conversations with me while their eyes glued to their cell-phone screens and their thumbs around the keypad like it was a Nintendo controller. It's sleek. It's silent. It's mobile. It's fast, like a phone call but less invasive and with a wider reach.

For this reason, the phone tree, which was the epitome of organized communication in my middle-school days, has quickly been replaced among the younger generations. Sorry, Mr. Phone Tree, you were just too darn slow and loud.

The only question remains: when can we replace phone banks?

Intelligent Centralization

Jonah Sieger certainly made a lot of insightful points last night. Walking away, though, something bothered me about the Bloomberg "decentralization" plan. The way Sieger described it, the mayor's campaign has established an advanced peer-to-peer volunteer campaign in which people of the same neigborhood or ethnicity would be campaigning to one another. The Internet, of course, is the tie that binds here, as the tool that brings these volunteers to the campaign and, then, to the voters.

While I think this strategy makes for good campaigning, I'm not sure I agree with the term "decentralization." To me, this represents merely a step toward decentralization -- and not a very large one. After all, the campaign presumably still trains the volunteers, arms them with talking points and brochures. They just micromanage less. What is decentralized about it, we asked? Sieger pointed to "definitive compromises" made between the campaign and its grassroots volunteers, including the major decision of when to have the captain meetings.

Again, I think this is the kind of campaign innovation that wins elections. I'd even call it "intelligent centralization." But, don't call this decentralization. The reality is, campaigns don't want more decentralization (the theory itself is inherently risky), and the daring ones that actually try it to any large extent get called "utter failures" in the end.

Thanks, Damien, for getting the ball rolling here.

Woo! Go China!

Although I'm writing this under exile having been late getting auto-updates up and running, I want to call all of our attention to the wonderful government of China, which according to Yahoo! News is forcing all Chinese websites to register with the government. Seeing as how this governmet has already jailed 54 owners of sites already registered for "subversive content," I can't imagine why anyone would be hesitant to follow orders here.

In light of considerations of possible FEC regulation of the blogs, it's time to thank China for once again for tossing in a bit of perspective.

Enter the Blogging Congressman

Congressman Conyers may be the most unlikely hero one can imagine for the liberal blogs. Having been in Congress for 40 years, we should all be surprised this guy knows how to check his e-mail or even know what a blog is, much less write and operate his very own blog.

But, of late, Conyers has found the blogosphere the perfect place to vocalize his consistently progressive dissent. He took the fore on the Gannon/Guckert scandal, the Ohio election investigation, and most recently, the Downing Street Memo, which has his supporters talking about impeachment. Of course, Conyers knows impeachments better than anyone -- he's the only member of Congress ever to have served on two impeachment hearing panels. The Detroit congressman not only has fallen in love with the new media; he's virtually become the de facto representative of the liberal blogosphere.

It seems like the blogs are an amazing platform from which a politically marginalized officeholder can take root and rally the troops with the hope that blog-lightning will strike and something will catch fire. So far, nothing Conyers has talked about has been effective at doing major damage to President Bush -- even though a lot of fiery subjects have been discussed.

The larger question this raises is how seriously will America take calls for impeachment that are ignited by the blogs? Is it just a matter of pressuring the media into making it news?

Buckley Makes Me Want to Curl Up in a Big Ball

Russell Buckley has successfully scared me to death.

No, it's not the heart attack-triggering scared like the time my little sister hid in my closet one night and proceeded to emerge once I was safely tucked into bed. It's more the throw-your-arms-up-in-helplessness scared.

As Buckley signals the "death knell of privacy," I start to think: why haven't I been worrying about this for years? And why does everyone else seem to be oblivious or less-than-mildly concerned? Sure, I'm that type of person: the worrier about how all this wonderful technology is going to end up ruining my life. After I took a class with a professor who was a resident expert on privacy issues, I decided I'd rather not have databases of information -- however innocuous -- about me floating around to propsective insurers, employers and friends. I'd rather not have someone be able to Google what I bought at Harris-Teeter last month and then decide they can't insure/employ/respect me because I may or may not be chemically dependent on Diet Dr Pepper.

I feel very alone on this one. I watch others in front of me happily swipe their VIC (is that Very Important Customer?) cards and get their well-earned discounts while a database somewhere fills up with how much sodium they're eating. The public seems oblivious and generally unperturbed by these Orwellian prospects.

So far, the heavily intrusive implementations of these technologies have yet to be used to any great extent -- at least, not publicly. Perhaps if employee-tracking became common in America, we'd see some uproar.

From an admittedly contradictory political perspective, however, the possibilities are endless. I'll submit to you a quick three that come to mind:
1) A campaign that is targeting young, single intellectuals might be able to hit everyone with a mobile device in a coffee house in its district.
2) GOTV efforts can be boosted by poll-tracking devices that know if a voter has yet visited the the polls. Furthermore, you can more easily reach the voters who haven't.
3) Campaigns should be able to pinpoint where visitors to their website are logging on (not to mention which parts of the site they're looking at), lending to a much tighter targeting ability in canvassing and direct mail messaging.

As Buckley says, the good uses for this technology require creativity and ingenuity, as we're seeing in the Wired story about saving lives in South Africa or the CNN story about war protesting with mobile technology. But the evil uses are easier. And we all like our jobs easier.